Vanessa Redgrave (age 88) bangs a pot for Gaza at the Lambeth Town Hall in London... Sharing it on social media, photographer Misan Harriman wrote: "I burst into tears when I saw this image of our national treasure, Vanessa Redgrave, still fighting for us to recognise the humanity of Palestinians 46 years after her Oscars speech. She has endured so much for this cause, but she still shows her solidarity in London today!"

2025: Vanessa Redgrave (age 88) bangs a pot for Gaza at the Lambeth Town Hall in London. 

In 1977, Redgrave produced the film The Palestinian.  Zionist groups tried to shut down the film. She won the Oscar for her role in Julia that year, and told the Academy, "In the last few weeks you have stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threat of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums, whose behaviour is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world, and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression."

The following year, the Jewish Defence League bombed the Doheny Plaza theatre in Los Angeles, where The Palestinian was to be screened.

In a 2018 interview, Redgrave stood by her acceptance speech (which included the "Zionist hoodlums" remark) during the 1978 Academy Awards ceremony.  

Vanessa Redgrave, 1978 Oscar ceremony. She won for the film Julia. She starred in the title role as a woman murdered by the Nazi German regime in the years prior to World War II for her anti-Fascist activism.

BRITANNICA: Her political activities were not without repercussions: she was loudly booed at the 1978 Academy Awards ceremony when, during her acceptance speech, she referred to those who had objected to her nomination because of her support for Palestinian causes as “Zionist hoodlums.” Jewish organizations also protested when she was cast as Holocaust survivor Fania Fenelon in Playing for Time. There is little doubt that Redgrave’s political views affected her career, although public resentment waned in the 1990s, when she played character roles in popular films such as Mission: Impossible (1996) and Deep Impact (1998).  https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-film

MSN: Vanessa Redgrave, 88, praised for attending protest

Vanessa Redgrave has been praised for turning up to a protest addressing the ongoing starvation crisis in Gaza.

 

In recent weeks, there has been increased international attention on the suffering of civilians in Gaza, with photos of starving Palestinians, including babies, emerging.

With aid agencies issuing stark warnings about the desperate situation on the ground, there’s been a public outcry for intervention in the conflict, which is about to enter its third year.

Although Israel has denied any responsibility for what experts have now called a famine, it controls the flow of all aid into the enclave and has been blamed by agencies, including Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam International, for ‘restrictions, delays and fragmentation’ for ‘chaos, starvation and death’.

Over the weekend, more protests occurred across the world calling for action, including in London, where Redgrave, a long-time supporter of Palestine, was spotted.

On Friday evening, the pots and pans for Palestine protest was held at the Lambeth Town Hall in Brixton, with attendees asked to ‘bang pots and pans to echo the hunger faced by Palestinians trapped under blockade’. 

The demonstration, organised by Lambeth and Southwark for Palestine and West Norwood 4 Palestine, was part of a UK-wide day of action, with the acclaimed actress photographed taking part.

Photos taken at the event show the 88-year-old in a wheelchair holding a spoon and pan.

Sharing it on social media, photographer Misan Harriman wrote: ‘I burst into tears when I saw this image of our national treasure, Vanessa Redgrave, still fighting for us to recognise the humanity of Palestinians 46 years after her Oscars speech. She has endured so much for this cause, but she still shows her solidarity in London today! READ MORE  https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/vanessa-redgrave-88-praised-for-attending-protest/ar-AA1JPw4R

  AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]

A 2025 BANG on POTs protest of Israel's systematic starvation & torture of Palestinian men, women, & children in Gaza #PALESTINE

Misan Harriman

Sdtpenroostl657ch67ff2i9548h9a03lt13l41t59i4868a67ctaai56gu1  ·

I just discovered that the woman on the right is Selma James, an American writer, feminist, and social activist. She co-authored the book 'The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community' with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and coordinates the Global Women’s Strike. She is also a co-founder of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. She will turn 95 next month. She was married to C L. R. James. The woman with her is an activist named Nina Lopez.

Still marching at 94 years old! Wow

Thanks for the information, @angeledavidguillou  https://www.instagram.com/p/DMlVsYEomZQ/

Mosab Abu Toha's poem "Daughter" on an official transport poster Victoria line train London "... That moment, her eyes sparkle with longing, I can see how she flies from the tent to a time when she leapt through our farm in every direction with eyes closed, only stopping at the fence, where our orange trees embrace our neighbour's olive trees..."

Mosab Abu Toha

@MosabAbuToha

A friend sent me this photo that he took this morning on the Victoria line train London (southbound). It is a poster of my poem “Daughter” on the subway. It is an official Transport for London poster, too.

6:11 PM · May 30, 2025

 "... I love the smell of oranges best

when she remembers"

 Page 37 in The Forest of Noise 

  “In Forest of Noise, his astonishing second book, Mosab Abu Toha is the essential poet embodying the humanity of Gaza, the precious hopes and dreams of all humans, the searing collective cries of children, the indelible honest conscience, the heart and soul. Miraculously he has continued speaking and writing through the horrific genocide of his people and beloved place. His elemental poems dissolve the empty rhetoric and posturing with simple, striking truth. Not blows. Who else among us founds a library in our early twenties? Today Mosab’s books may be crushed, but his most powerful spirit is not.”—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist

Stephen Kapos is a regular figure on the pro-Palestine marches, often as part of the ever-growing Jewish bloc: “My message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up.”

Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos  STOP THE WAR

 

“My message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up.” – Stephen Kapos

A Holocaust survivor opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza on Wednesday told U.S. student protesters they’re on the right side of history, and that the global wave of demonstrations against the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians will soon force Western leaders to face up to their complicity in genocide.

Stephen Kapos, 86, was 7 years old in 1944 when he was separated from his family during the Nazi extermination of Jews in his native Hungary. Most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust but Kapos survived and moved to the United Kingdom after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Kapos is part of a small group of Shoah survivors and their descendants who “demonstrate disagreement with the use of the Holocaust experience as a cover by the Zionists and the state of Israel.” They attend protests wearing signs around their necks reading, “This Holocaust Survivor Says Stop the Genocide in Gaza!”

“As a Holocaust survivor, my message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up,” Kapos said in video published by Double Down News. “We are doing exactly the same, and in the long term we are going to prevail.”

Kapos’ comments came amid a growing wave of pro-Palestine student protests—many of them Jewish-led—on dozens of U.S. university and college campuses in response to Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice in January found “plausibly” genocidal and which many Israeli and international experts say is undoubtedly a genocide.

According to Gazan and international officials, more than 122,000 Palestinians have been killed or maimed during 202 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks. This figure includes around 11,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings. Around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced. Starvation and dehydration caused by Israel’s bombardment and blockade of Gaza are killing children and other vulnerable people.

Instead of condemning Israeli leaders, the Biden administration has lavished them with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid while providing diplomatic cover for Israeli crimes and blocking recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.

As the suffering in Gaza continues, U.S. students have set up encampments or staged other forms of protest, some of which have been brutally repressed by police—who have also attacked and arrested journalists and bystanders.

On Wednesday, far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored U.S. authorities to crack down even harder on the students, whom he called an “antisemitic mob.”

Highlighting video footage of Netanyahu comparing the student protests to what happened at German universities during the rise of Nazism, Kapos said that “the way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they’re doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.”

He said he is also protesting “the conflating of Jewishness with Zionism, which is what the Israeli state is trying to do, which does nothing but increase antisemitism.”

Kapos predicted that “today’s marches are having a very hopeful aspect that is so large, so persistent, so global that eventually the Western leadership—which are trying to deny what is actually going on—will be forced to face up to it, and I think we are not far from that.”

“There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism,” Kapos asserted. “If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt without any doubt and I think it is imperative to assert opposition and even some degree of disadvantage and risk if you want to be guilt-free when history judges what’s happening.”

Kapos and his comrades are part of a long history of Holocaust survivors speaking out against Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

Long before today’s growing acknowledgment that Israel is an apartheid state, the late Suzanne Weiss—whose parents were murdered in Nazi-occupied France—said in 2010 that “the Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and apartheid” and that “the Israeli government’s actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family’s experiences under Hitlerism.”

Hajo Meyer, who survived 10 months in the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, argued during his lifetime that “what is happening to the Palestinians every day under the occupation” was “almost identical” to “what was done to the German Jews before the ‘Final Solution,’” and that instead of making Jews safer, Israeli policies and practices were stoking the flames of antisemitism.

Holocaust survivors who stand up for Palestinian rights have been condemned by critics as “antisemites” and “self-hating Jews” who, in Meyer’s case, allegedly abused his status as a Holocaust survivor.

Kapos, who has experienced such slurs, is undaunted and says he has no plans to stop protesting. During a recent rally in London he vowed, “I’ll keep doing it as long as the bombing and apartheid and the injustice is going on.”

Source: Common Dreams

26 Apr 2024 • by Brett Wilkins

 Stop the War

Free Gaza: Stop the Massacre - End the Siege! 

🇵🇸 #MayDay4Palestine 🇵🇸

"It lifted my grieving heart to join crowds in London on the March for Palestine. We need more of them" - a timely Guardian op-ed by Nimer Sultany

‘It was heartening to see so many demonstrators showing solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.’ Photograph: Loredana Sangiuliano/SOPA Images/Shutterstock

It lifted my grieving heart to join crowds in London on the March for Palestine. We need more of them

by Nimer Sultany

UK politicians have been shamefully silent on the carnage visited on Palestinians in Gaza. Saturday’s protest was cathartic

• Nimer Sultany is reader in public law and a Palestinian citizen of Israel

On Saturday, for a few hours, I was finally able to breathe. Marching alongside tens of thousands of demonstrators in central London was reinvigorating. Like so many Palestinians abroad, I spent the week finding it hard to work or sleep; I watched in horror as Israel inflicted carnage on Gaza’s 2 million residents. In one week, according to one military expert, Israel dropped on the small and densely populated Gaza more bombs than the US dropped on Afghanistan in a year.

It was disturbing to see that the language of condemnation and political consensus was glaringly absent when it came to Palestinian civilian deaths in the face of an incomparably superior military force, which wiped out entire families and neighbourhoods live on-screen.

Despite Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, saying it will “eliminate everything” in Gaza and speaking of removing “restraints” on his troops, despite reported plans to raze entire cities to the ground and to drive out more than a million people from their homes, scores of British politicians repeatedly and bluntly refused to show concern for Palestinian civilian lives. This kind of disregard leads millions of Palestinians to reach an unavoidable conclusion: that, compared with Israelis, their lives are less precious, their freedom less urgent.

It is also astonishing when compared with western concern for Ukrainian lives. Only a year ago the EU considered Russian actions to cut water and electricity to be war crimes and “acts of pure terror”. But when Israel announced a similar policy to starve the population and inflict collective punishment, US and European leaders flew to Israel to show support. Are brown populations expendable?  ... READ MORE

 [AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine] 

In Growing Gardens for Palestine- Visualising Return exhibition (& online tour) in London December 2021

Growing Gardens for Palestine

Thursday, December 9, 2021

Visualising Return exhibition in London December 2021

Photos shared by Maher Naji  followed by some photos from the online visual tour by the Palestinian Return Centre

"Maher's artwork is inspired by his family's memories of Palestine before 1948. He relies on his mother's vast details of her memories, for every line and shape in his paintings, his art is a means of preserving Palestinian culture in the midst of Israeli settler colonial siege. The memories he paints, are also the hopeful visualisations of return." RETURN WEEK

A Girl in a Jerusalem Dress

A Girl in a Jerusalem Dress by Maher Naji

Full digital tour can be found here

https://prc.org.uk/en/album/2/digital-gallery